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PHETCHBURI, Thailand, Jan 18 (Reuters Life!) – The construction business is booming in the Thai coastal province of Phetchburi — but the buildings are for birds, not people
In the middle of the small fishing village of Ban Laem, 120 km (75 miles) south of Bangkok, about 100 doorless, multi-storey units have shot up.
Providing homes for thousands of small swiftlets, whose saliva-laced nests are the basic ingredient of “bird’s nest soup”, a prized Chinese delicacy, each four-storey condo costs up to 3.4 million baht (US$97,000) to build.
But it’s an investment worth making, locals believe, with birds’ nests thought to be a source of longevity and good health and worth as much as $2,000 a kilogram.
Aficionados will pay as much as $20 for a bowl of bird’s nest soup — around 20 times the cost of a bowl of standard noodle soup.
“People even came from Bangkok or other provinces to invest in this business,” said Wattana Termwattanapat, head of a local birds’ nest group.
Getting the flighty money makers to settle in the new houses can be hard, though.
“Each building will have its own technique to attract the birds to live in them. There are a variety of techniques,” said Termwattanapat.
Bird blocks attempt to create a “cave-like” ambience, with light blocked out, and temperatures kept cool by a water circulation system.
Owners also play birdsong CDs and smear the walls in droppings to give the homes an authentic cave smell that attracts the birds that were first found living in a Buddhist temple in Ban Laem.
Sparrow-sized swifts, found across Southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent, use their saliva to cement their nests to walls to protect them from predators.
The whiter the nest, the higher the quality and more expensive.
It takes about five days to build a nest and harvesters will take as many as three nests from a single pair of birds before allowing them to lay eggs.
While one housing unit can contain up to 20,000 birds, it takes 150 birds to make 1 kg (2.2 lbs) of birds nest, meaning the housing blocks are a long-term investment.
The convenient condos are safer than traditional methods of harvesting, which involve trained collectors climbing great heights to get the nests from caves, the birds’ typical nesting place.
Birds-house builders enjoying the boom are not worried about lack of customers.
“Anyone who comes to our project, we will build the building for them,” said Prajong Puangsuwan, who runs a bird house-building business. ($1 = 33 baht) (Reporting by Noppawan Bunluesilp; Editing by Gillian Murdoch)
